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Compilation, transcription and usage of a reference speech corpus: the case of the Slovene corpus GOS

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Abstract

In recent years, building reference speech corpora was an important part of the activities which provided the necessary linguistic infrastructure in many European countries, for languages with many speakers (e.g., French, German, Spanish, Italian) as well as for those with smaller numbers of speakers (e.g., Swedish, Dutch, Czech, Slovak). This paper describes the process of the creation of a reference speech corpus and its distribution to potential users, as it was done in the case of the Slovene corpus GOS. The corpus structure and fieldwork experiences with recording, labelling system, and two levels of transcription (pronunciation-based and standardized) are described, as well as the main characteristics of the corpus interface (web concordancer) and the availability of the original corpus files.

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Notes

  1. According to the Slovene Personal Data Protection Act (ZVOP), the collected data has been prepared in such a way that the speakers’ identity is no longer detectable. This is why we have anonymised all of the data in conversations concerning the speakers themselves, while the transcription only provides the type of the anonymised data, for example, [name], [surname], or [address]. On the audio recordings, the anonymised parts are covered by a beep, and within non-public discourse, the voice frequency has been changed.

  2. The Brazilian corpus C-ORAL-BRASIL faced a similar problem in constructing the “non-orthographic criteria” of transcription (Mello and Raso 2009) indicating new lexical structures, including acronyms, foreign words or vocal reductions related to verb paradigms, pronouns, prepositions, etc.

  3. These and all other examples of phonetic phenomena are represented in the Slovene SAMPA conventions (Zemljak Jontes et al. 2002).

  4. A similar type of transcription is known in different fields of discourse and pragmatic studies (e.g., the transcription system of conversation analysis developed by Gail Jefferson is well known; see Atkinson and Heritage 1984), while similar principles are used when people write in internet forums or chat rooms, or occasionally in literature (e.g., Welsh 1997) when authors want to characterize colloquial spoken language.

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Acknowledgments

The GOS corpus was built within the Communication in Slovene project. The operation was partly financed by the European Union, the European Social Fund, and the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport of the Republic of Slovenia. The operation was carried out within the operational programme Human Resources Development for the period 2007–2013, developmental priorities: improvement of the quality and efficiency of educational and training systems 2007–2013. The online search tool, a concordancer, was made as part of the “Online concordancer for the national spoken corpus of Slovene,” project, funded within the priority axis Economic Development Infrastructure and the priority strategy Information Society within the operational programme ‘Strengthening Regional Development Potentials’ for the period 2007-2013. We thank all the speakers who participated in the recordings for the GOS corpus, media companies who provided the recordings from their archive, as well as other companies and institutions, especially schools, where the recordings of official discourse were conducted.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia

    Darinka Verdonik

  2. Trojina, Institute for Applied Slovene Studies, Škofja Loka, Slovenia

    Iztok Kosem & Ana Zwitter Vitez

  3. Amebis, d.o.o., Kamnik, Slovenia

    Simon Krek

  4. University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

    Marko Stabej

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  1. Darinka Verdonik
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Correspondence to Darinka Verdonik.

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Verdonik, D., Kosem, I., Vitez, A.Z. et al. Compilation, transcription and usage of a reference speech corpus: the case of the Slovene corpus GOS. Lang Resources & Evaluation 47, 1031–1048 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-013-9216-5

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